Kraftfulla bett eller tandlösa råd?

Om två svenska lärosätens arbete med jämställdhet samt etnisk och social mångfald

Abstract

Academic institutions are expected to design and undertake equality work within their organizations. A common way of organizing this work is through committees with a consultative mandate in relation to the university principal and management board. The purpose of this article is to analyse meeting protocols from gender equality committees as well as from social and ethnic equality committees and to address, from a gender and organizational theory perspective, how the members of these committees perceive the interventions considered. The main research questions are: are there differences between committees dealing with gender, social and ethnic equality and/or among the committee members´ experiences of the committee work? On what feminist assumptions do the proposed interventions rest? Do the interventions open the way for changing power relations and what are their limitations? Data collection took place at two Swedish universities where interviews were conducted with 22 committee members, and 80 meeting protocols stretching over a four year time period were scrutinized. The results show that the gender equality committees are more established than the committees dealing with social and ethnic equality. The work of the committees is to a large extent focused on internal activities such as information dissemination and discussions concerning how to organize their work. The external interventions designed to effect change are first and foremost of a strategic or educational character. Committee members express uncertainty about the success of their work with these interventions. Such interventions are presumably of great importance but are not designed in a comprehensive way. These interventions are unlikely to pose a significant challenge to existing power relations since they do not address the conditions and factors that sustain these structures in the first place.